The Horse Adjutant: A boy's life in the Nazi Holocaust [signed]

The Horse Adjutant is the wartime story of Leon Schagrin who was 12 years old when the Nazis invaded and occupied his hometown of Grybow in southern Poland. Leon grew up with his father who was a self-trained veterinarian, caring for local livestock. This placed him in close contact with horses from an early age. The skills he learned provided him with something of value to the Nazis and put him at the center of some of their most infamous crimes. Meanwhile, Leon's family, four sisters and a baby brother, along with his father and mother, 200 cousins and the entire region of Southern Poland were sent to the extermination camp at Belzec where over 600,000 people were killed in a single year! Leon survived as a laborer in a quarry until he was sent to the ghetto at Tarnow whereas youth driver of a horse carriage he became the preferred driver of Hauptsturmführer Blache, the Nazi Commandant of Tarnow ghetto and witnessed the extermination of the ghetto. He, himself, was rescued from a mass grave and sent to another concentration camp at Szebnia where he continued working with horses. After a short stay in Szebnia Leon was stripped and shipped naked and with hundreds of other Jews in cattle cars to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Surviving the selection, he was assigned to work in the Buna Camp youth section of the IG Farben industrial plant. In an air raid bombing of the plant, he was wounded in the neck. Hos wound allowed him to remain at the camp when it was evacuated allowing him to escape the death march. In this weakened condition, he survived ten days with no food until the Russian Army liberated the camp in 1945.At each location, Leon was both victim and witness to the Nazi Holocaust. His story is filled with dramatic instances of degradation, humanity and the kindness of strangers that kept him alive.